The Electric Chamber

This is one of the best scores in my collection. In the mid-'90s I had been closely following the career of William Orbit, especially after his phenomenal Strange Cargo III album. He brought an usually lush, dark, dubby, slightly skewed sensibility to his productions and had just announced the formation of a new label – N-Gram – and had the first three releases all ready. The first was to be a solo album by cellist and vocalist Caroline Lavelle. The second was a new release by an old William Orbit concern, Torch Song, and the third was to be a collection of favored classical pieces, given the Orbit twist. I kept my ear glued to KCRW, and awaited each release breathlessly.

Not long before that, I had stumbled across the extremely rare collaboration between Orbit and vocalist Beth Orton that, for whatever reason, had only been released in Japan. It’s a wonderful disc and very appealing and I can’t figure out why it was left to die such an ignominiously obscure death. I had also run across that one by listening to KCRW. Chris Douridas, the music director for the station and the captain of their flagship show, Morning Becomes Eclectic, used to like to play the first track from the album (a winning cover of John Martyn’s I Don’t Want to Know About Evil) on his show, and then field the dozen desperate calls that inevitably followed. People would be frantically trying to figure out who that was and where they could get it, and he’d answer coolly, “It’s Beth Orton, and you can’t.” Ha ha ha. They always were a bit sadistic like that at KCRW, constantly torturing you with special tracks or bonus DAT remixes of really cool songs that there was no way you could find. So I considered it a personal victory when I got my hands on a Japanese pressing of Superpinkymandy, the coveted Beth Orton album.

KCRW had a good relationship with William Orbit at the time, and was always playing special tracks of his or talking to him about upcoming projects. They even hosted his wondrously weird series of radio collages Stereo Oddysey for eight weeks (the tapes of those shows are another prized Orbit artifact). Anyway, it was through these broadcasts that I was able to keep track of what was happening in Orbitland and would know exactly when something was available so I could rush down to my local CD haunt as soon as anything had been released.

My excitement rose with each release. Caroline Lavelle’s album was wonderfully dark and Celtic and romantic and lush. The Torch Song album pushed dub-tronics into a new realm, and I marveled at the crystalline production and organic atmosphere floating over the subterranean bass. But the one I was really waiting for was Electric Chamber, William Orbit’s take on classical music. He had bled a couple of examples out early to KCRW, who liked teasing its listeners with his as-yet-unavailable version of Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Then, during a phone interview, Orbit let slip that he was preparing a version of Arvo Pärt’s Fratres for the album. Fratres is probably my favorite piece of classical music and something I was obsessed with at the time, and this little bit of news exploded in my head. The next two weeks waiting for the release were torture. Finally, the day arrived, and I sat in my editing room, cheerfully waiting for a lunchtime trip to Aron’s, my favorite local record store.

Then, tragedy struck. Chris Dourides said that the album had been recalled. Due to some legal difficulties and the case of one of the pieces not being in the public domain when it was supposed it was, all shipments of the album had been stopped and the few that did get out were being recalled. As far as Chris knew, none of the shipments headed for the United States had made it out of England. And then, to stick the knife in, he played Orbit’s version of Fratres. Ha ha ha.

I quickly called Rhino Records, the venerable alternative shop on the Westside and asked if they had a copy. The guy who answered the phone said they had four. I asked him to put one on hold for me, but then somebody wrestled the phone away from him and told me that actually, they didn’t have any, but if I wanted to put my name on a waiting list, he’d let me know if some came in.

Crazy with frustration, I took lunch early and ran out to Aron’s. I went immediately to their new import release rack, and there, saw a divider for Electric Chamber. It was empty. Stamping and cursing, I went to the regular import racks and started looking through the E section, knowing it would be fruitless. And lo and behold, there at the end of the rack, was a single copy of Electric Chamber, Pieces in a Modern Style. I nearly burst into tears on the spot and had to look at it for five minutes just to make sure it was real. I flipped it over, and there on the back, halfway through the track listings, was Fratres. Trembling, I took it up to the counter. I was sure they were not going to let me buy it for some reason, but they did and I walked out of the store, clutching my new treasure and so happy that I could barely eat lunch.

The album was everything I had hoped it would be – beautifully produced, tastefully dubby versions of some great, mostly romantic and impressionistic classical music. Orbit’s touch is light and respectful, while still leaving his own distinctive finger prints. It's slumber dub, perfect for late night after partys or sunday brunch with the inlaws.

Shortly after closing the N-Gram shop with only four releases to their catalog (the fourth was Orbit’s fourth installment of the Strange Cargo series), Orbit hooked up with Madonna for her popular album, Ray of Light. This newfound notoriety and visibility allowed him to go back and rework the lost classics album and re-release it five years later on Madonna’s own Maverick label. Released under his own name this time, William Orbit’s Pieces in a Modern Style is a critical and (to some degree) popular success, and almost nobody knows the tortuous story of this album’s difficult birth.

Of course, I bought the new version when it came out and was glad to see that many of my favorites were still intact, plus there was some tantalizing new tracks: a couple of Beethoven tracks, and a little Handel and Vivaldi to boot. Of course, to make room for these new tracks, some of the originals had to be cut. Among those that didn’t make the cut was my beloved Fratres. If I had been unable to get that first version, and then waited for five years for the second version to come out only to discover that Fratres had been cut, I very well might have died of a broken heart. I may never have won the lottery or hit it big in Vegas, but scoring the original release of Electric Chamber is all the proof I need that I’m a lucky man and somebody is watching out for me.

I was glad Orbit finally got some recognition for his album, but there’s something I always find a bit troubling about popular updates of classical pieces. Listeners often fall over themselves praising somebody who dresses the old masters up in new finery, whether that be jazz (Jacques Loussier’s entire canon of jazz trios based on Bach), kitschy lounge (The Swingle Singers’ Jazz Sebastian Bach), rock (Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Pictures at an Exhibition), disco (Walter Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven), hip hop (The Latin Rascal’s Bach to the Future) or, now, electronica (granted, Walter Carlos (back when he had all his original equipment) pushed synthesizers into broad public awareness with his Switched-On Bach albums, but he wasn’t updating the material so much as playing it on different instruments). What this recurring discovery really points to is that – what do you know? – some of that longhair classical music is pretty good! Of course, that discovery rarely leads people back to the source, but it can be quite profitable for those mad sonic scientists who split its DNA off and recombine it with other idioms. Reggae Ravel? Shoegazing Stravinsky? Grunge Greig? The sky’s the limit.